Court Says Italy Can't Block The Pirate Bay

from the ah,-pesky-laws dept

Lots of people were surprised back in August when a prosecutor in Italy told Italian ISPs they needed to start blocking The Pirate Bay. That was problematic for a variety of reasons -- from why ISPs should be responsible for filtering content to why The Pirate Bay had no chance to tell its side of the story to (the most questionable of all) the fact that ISPs were told to redirect people to a site run by the record labels. But, of course, as with any of these blocks, the attention only served to drive more traffic to The Pirate Bay in Italy.

Still, even ordering the blocks in the first place seemed highly questionable, so The Pirate Bay asked an Italian court to reverse the order -- and that's exactly what's happened. The court has ordered that the bans be lifted. So, it appears that all the Italian prosecutor did was drive a lot more traffic to The Pirate Bay by getting it a lot more attention, without being able to actually ban the site.